Questrade Reviews

Former Employee – worked at Questrade

Pros – Questrade has been able to attract several talented people. It does this by paying somewhat decent salaries and promoting employees quickly (too quickly?) to their level of incompetence.

Cons – -Talent is wasted by managers that have never written a line of code in their lives.
-Questrade is a financial services company that is new to software development.
-Projects are rarely completed on time or on budget. Project management is completely ad hoc.
-Technical teams often work on weekends without compensation or days in lieu.
-QA teams are understaffed and see very high turnover.
-Poor technical management. Key decision-makers and stakeholders are not technical people.
-Managers are unable to assess the skills and abilities of the technical staff.
-Surprisingly few opportunities to learn about the field of investing.
-Issues with morale across the entire company.
-Nepotism is prevalent across the company.
-The company is unable to learn from past mistakes and continues to make the same ones, over and over again.

The last point is especially problematic. The company culture at Questrade is one that does not deal well with mistakes. Rather than accepting fault for a bad decision, managers seek out a scapegoat in order to protect themselves. This has the secondary effect of delaying important decisions for as long as possible.

The project I worked on has been in active development for over 4 years and was expected to launch 2 years ago. If one is moderately skilled at software development, they would do well to steer clear of Questrade. And for those, like myself, who made the honest mistake of joining the company--no doubt with the best of intentions--it's time to dust off those resumes and go work for a real software company. The feeling of wonder and excitement you will experience when you release working code to real customers is like no other.

Advice to Senior Management – In order to succeed, the leadership at Questrade would have to step aside and appoint technical managers that have a history of delivering software to a large customer base.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Questrade

Pros – -pay is industry standard.
-gets you experience in financial industry.
-some of the employees are very smart people.
-you are in immigrant who has trouble finding work.
-just get in, take what you can, get out and move to something better as quickly as you can.

Cons – -there is no such thing as work/life balance, I've never seen a company exploit it's people so badly.
-at the end of the day, your work hours are so long that when you calculate your hourly wage, it ends up being pretty sad.
-massive employee turnover, even in management. This place is a meat market.
-management/supervisors don't care at all about employees. They mostly can't even be bothered to respond to direct emails or questions, unless it's to string you along and keep you working. They don't understand that it's the people that give a company value; it's not how hard you can work them, but how productive they are. No one is productive when they work day and night.
-There is little communication between departments, unless it's to pass blame. This is not a co-operative environment. Expect the intensely unhealthy working environment to result in politics and back-stabbing, and be prepared.

Advice to Senior Management – Just because someone is brilliant or genius, it does not necessarily translate into a good employee or manager.

If the genius doesn't know how to share, play with others, he may appear to be even more of a genius because no one else is permitted the data to solve problems. Your genius may find some way to convince you that others should be able to fix things while keeping all others in a vacuum.That means only he can fix things. This is good for the genius, but bad for everyone else, and bad for Questrade. Good employees will become discouraged and leave or find that they are not able to be productive in your current environment. You will be left with only your genius, and a bunch of unproductive employees.

I'm sorry for the negative review. I'd like to see Questrade succeed and I wish them all the best. Good luck!

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Questrade

Pros – It's an interim firm at best - if you need a paycheck, which is a shame because they do have some talented and caring senior managers (I don't know how they managed to pull that off - maybe with the promise of growth and incentives but it won't last long). They must be frustrated just as much if not more than the more junior staff.

Cons – Owners, including the CEO, CFO, VP business development are clueless when it comes to running a growing firm. It's like they are stuck in a small business mentality and have no idea what employees mean to the success of the firm. They recently did a company-wide employee satisfaction survey and there is little confidence the owners will actually act on it since they literally treat their staff with limited respect and integrity. Whenever there is turnover, their attitude is just to get another intern, recent graduate, etc. as opposed to doing something about it.

Advice to Senior Management – Practice what you preach and lead by example. If you manage by the numbers then you will no doubt treat staff like a number. As a result, you'll lose insight to not only the disenchanted staff but your precious customer base.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend